of Actium largely did away with that role. The empire made little effort to Romanize the region, which remained largely Greek. One notable event of this period was the notorious misgovernment of Verres, as recorded by Cicero in 70 BC in his oration, In Verrem. Another was the Sicilian revolt under Sextus Pompeius, which liberated the island from Roman rule for a brief period. A lasting legacy of the Roman occupation, in economic and agricultural terms, was the establishment of the large landed estates, often owned by distant Roman nobles (the latifundia). Despite its largely neglected status, Sicily was able to make a contribution to Roman culture through the historian Diodorus Siculus and the poet Calpurnius Siculus. The most famous archeological remains of this period are the mosaics of a nobleman's villa in present-day Piazza Armerina. An inscription from Hadrian's reign lauds the emperor as "The Restorer of Sicily", although it is not known what he did to earn this accolade. It was also during this period that we find one of the first Christian communities in Sicily. Amongst the earliest Christian martyrs were the Sicilians Saint Agatha of Catania and Saint Lucy of Syracuse. Early Middle Ages Germanic and Byzantine period As the Roman Empire was falling apart, a tribe of Franks conquered Syracuse in 280 AD; subsequently a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals took Sicily in 440 AD under the rule of their king Genseric. The Vandals had entered the Empire crossing the Rhine the last night of 406 with three other tribes. They were in Gaul until October 409 when they entered Spain where they remained until 429 crossing over to North Africa. The Romans, unable to defeat them, ceded two Mauretanian provinces and the western half of Numidia in 435. However, in October 439 they seized the rest of the Roman provinces, inserting themselves as an important power in western Europe. After the sacking of Rome in 455 the Vandals seized Corsica and Sardinia which they kept until the end of their kingdom in 533. In 476 Odoacer gained most of Sicily for the payment of tribute to the Vandals. In 491 Theodoric gained control over the entire island after repulsing a Vandal invasion and seizing their remaining outpost Lilybaeum on the western tip of the island. The Gothic War took place between the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine